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Lot Essay
‘Blinky Palermo gave us some of the most beautiful, authentically spiritual objects to be made in the ’70s’ (Donald Kuspit)
Acquired by the Crex Collection in 1975, Untitled (1971) is a unique example of Blinky Palermo’s Stoffbilder, or fabric pictures: some of the most radical and elegant works in the history of post-war painting. Created between 1966 and 1972, the Stoffbilder are large-scale colour fields that began as bolts of fabric purchased from department stores. These were sewn together in two- or three-colour combinations—with the help of Gerhard Richter’s first wife, Ema—before being fixed over stretchers. Conflating Modernist flatness, Minimalist objecthood and a Pop engagement with the materials of consumer culture, the Stoffbilder redefined painting with seemingly effortless economy and grace. They were also visually mesmerising, evoking the sublime canvases of Mark Rothko or Barnett Newman.
The present work consists of two subtly different zones of black, divided at the vertical midpoint. Among the approximately sixty extant Stoffbilder, it is an exceptional rarity. Aside from the small-scale Rot-Rosa (1966-1967)—a lone survivor from Palermo’s very first group of fabric works, which were otherwise destroyed—it is the only example with a vertical rather than a horizontal division. First exhibited in the artist’s posthumous show at Museum Haus Lange, Krefeld (1977-1978), it has since appeared in major retrospectives in Düsseldorf (2007-2008) and the United States (2010-2011).
Beloved by his contemporaries and idolised by artists today, Palermo has become an almost mythical figure. He was adopted soon after his birth in Leipzig in 1943, taking the name Peter Heisterkamp. His adoptive mother passed away when he was only fifteen. In 1962, he enrolled at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf—a hotbed of artistic experimentation at the time—joining the class of its charismatic leader, Joseph Beuys, in 1964. It was there that he took on his nom d’artiste, thanks to a supposed likeness to the New York boxing promoter and mafioso Frank ‘Blinky’ Palermo. His close friends at the academy included Imi Knoebel, Gerhard Richter and Sigmar Polke. Upon his graduate show in 1966, Beuys named him his Meisterschüler, or master student. The Stoffbilder, as well as painted ‘objects’ and a series of wall-paintings that relinquished the canvas entirely, propelled a meteoric career in Germany and later in New York, where Palermo lived from 1973. He died four years later, aged thirty-three, on a trip to the Maldives.
The Stoffbilder relate to works made by both Richter and Polke during these Düsseldorf years. Richter’s ‘colour chart’ paintings, also commenced in 1966, were grids of colour derived from commercial samplers: governed by the samplers’ arbitrary arrangement, they were effectively found compositions, and emphasised the paint’s status as a manufactured product. Polke’s own Stoffbilder, begun in 1964, involved painting over patterned fabrics that evoked the kitsch interior decor of the time, forming a playful critique of post-war West Germany’s bourgeois consumer culture. He and Palermo went textile-shopping together: Polke lamented humorously that while he searched high and low for the best patterned material, Palermo ‘sewed two pieces of fabric together and had the day off’ (S. Polke quoted in P. Gottschaller, Palermo: Inside His Images, Munich 2004, p. 58).
While Palermo’s approach echoed the Pop quality of Richter and Polke’s work, his Stoffbilder also represented a revision of the very fundamentals of painting. Unlike Richter’s painted colour charts, the dyed fabrics refined form, support and colour into an impeccable unity, fulfilling the Modernist ideal of ‘flatness.’ Palermo would back later examples such as the present work with an opaque cotton canvas that prevented any translucency, keeping the colours on the surface. If they shared a consumer-cultural origin with Polke’s fabrics—‘the very stuff that the economic miracle was made of as it entered every German’s living room and closet’, as Christine Mehring notes—their chromatic purity transcended these trappings to approach an Abstract Expressionist sublime (C. Mehring quoted in ibid., p. 61). Finally, by outsourcing not only their colour but also their fabrication—via Ema Richter’s sewing machine—Palermo enacted a Minimalist elision of the artist’s hand.
Inspired early on by Kazimir Malevich, Palermo’s greatest artistic heroes were Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman. He shared these enthusiasms with Imi Knoebel, who accompanied him on a pilgrimage to the Rothko Chapel in Houston in 1974. From his teenage years he was also a passionate follower of jazz music, collecting records that he played in his studio, attending concerts in Berlin and visiting underground clubs and bars in 1970s New York. Polke, who deeply admired Palermo’s work, believed that music was key to understanding his carefully orchestrated combinations of colour. ‘With regard to the sewn-together fabrics,’ Polke said, ‘one has to say that they are chords. Palermo was someone who liked music very much. Music provides the vocabulary with which one gets closer to it … if you follow them, they are like zones of calm, the pictures weren’t legends, weren’t stories. In a room with Palermos, there was silence at first’ (S. Polke quoted in ibid., p. 59). The present work, with its twin fields of black, resounds with a lasting splendour.
Works from the Crex Art Collection
Christie’s is delighted to present an outstanding group of seven works from the prestigious Crex Art Collection. Spread across the 20th/21st Century London Evening Sale and the Post-War & Contemporary Art Day Sale this October, these works capture the pioneering spirit of one of Europe’s finest collections of Minimalist and Conceptual art.
Begun in Zurich in the early 1970s, the Crex Collection was distinguished by its revolutionary focus on the art of its day. In 1978, it showcased its holdings in a major touring exhibition that travelled to institutions including the Louisiana Museum, Humlebaek and the Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven. Already the collection included works by artists including Robert Mangold, Sol LeWitt, Blinky Palermo and Donald Judd, as well as Gerhard Richter, Sigmar Polke and Neo-Expressionist painters such as Georg Baselitz and Markus Lüpertz. Writing in the catalogue, Rudi Fuchs wrote that ‘It was not primarily the desire to own art, it seems, which prompted this collection; there was also the profound wish to support art, contemporary art, in a country with many collections of classic art but with only little activity in the field of really contemporary art’ (R. Fuchs, quoted in Werke aus der Sammlung Crex, Zurich 1978, p. 129).
During the early 1980s, the collection took up residence in the Hallen für neue Kunst in Schaffhausen: a former textile factory. It was one of the first exhibition spaces to make use of an industrial building in this way, and mounted a series of major shows until 2014. Its celebration of both European and American artists, and its dedication to their public display, transformed the landscape for contemporary art in Switzerland and beyond.
All acquired shortly after their creation, the present selection of works demonstrates the sharp connoisseurly vision of the Crex Collection. Highlights include a rare and unique example of Blinky Palermo’s Stoffbilder (Fabric Pictures), distinguished by its vertical rather than horizontal seam. Gerhard Richter’s Grau is one of the landmark group of Grey Paintings that the artist unveiled at the Städtisches Museum, Mönchengladbach in 1974. Brown Wall (1964) is one of the very first works in Robert Mangold’s seminal Walls series, while his Four Color Frame Painting #16 (1985) featured on the cover of The Paris Review in 1989. Completing the selection are works by Markus Lüpertz, Sol LeWitt and Richard Long, rounding out a tightly-curated snapshot of one of the twentieth century’s richest art-historical periods.
Acquired by the Crex Collection in 1975, Untitled (1971) is a unique example of Blinky Palermo’s Stoffbilder, or fabric pictures: some of the most radical and elegant works in the history of post-war painting. Created between 1966 and 1972, the Stoffbilder are large-scale colour fields that began as bolts of fabric purchased from department stores. These were sewn together in two- or three-colour combinations—with the help of Gerhard Richter’s first wife, Ema—before being fixed over stretchers. Conflating Modernist flatness, Minimalist objecthood and a Pop engagement with the materials of consumer culture, the Stoffbilder redefined painting with seemingly effortless economy and grace. They were also visually mesmerising, evoking the sublime canvases of Mark Rothko or Barnett Newman.
The present work consists of two subtly different zones of black, divided at the vertical midpoint. Among the approximately sixty extant Stoffbilder, it is an exceptional rarity. Aside from the small-scale Rot-Rosa (1966-1967)—a lone survivor from Palermo’s very first group of fabric works, which were otherwise destroyed—it is the only example with a vertical rather than a horizontal division. First exhibited in the artist’s posthumous show at Museum Haus Lange, Krefeld (1977-1978), it has since appeared in major retrospectives in Düsseldorf (2007-2008) and the United States (2010-2011).
Beloved by his contemporaries and idolised by artists today, Palermo has become an almost mythical figure. He was adopted soon after his birth in Leipzig in 1943, taking the name Peter Heisterkamp. His adoptive mother passed away when he was only fifteen. In 1962, he enrolled at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf—a hotbed of artistic experimentation at the time—joining the class of its charismatic leader, Joseph Beuys, in 1964. It was there that he took on his nom d’artiste, thanks to a supposed likeness to the New York boxing promoter and mafioso Frank ‘Blinky’ Palermo. His close friends at the academy included Imi Knoebel, Gerhard Richter and Sigmar Polke. Upon his graduate show in 1966, Beuys named him his Meisterschüler, or master student. The Stoffbilder, as well as painted ‘objects’ and a series of wall-paintings that relinquished the canvas entirely, propelled a meteoric career in Germany and later in New York, where Palermo lived from 1973. He died four years later, aged thirty-three, on a trip to the Maldives.
The Stoffbilder relate to works made by both Richter and Polke during these Düsseldorf years. Richter’s ‘colour chart’ paintings, also commenced in 1966, were grids of colour derived from commercial samplers: governed by the samplers’ arbitrary arrangement, they were effectively found compositions, and emphasised the paint’s status as a manufactured product. Polke’s own Stoffbilder, begun in 1964, involved painting over patterned fabrics that evoked the kitsch interior decor of the time, forming a playful critique of post-war West Germany’s bourgeois consumer culture. He and Palermo went textile-shopping together: Polke lamented humorously that while he searched high and low for the best patterned material, Palermo ‘sewed two pieces of fabric together and had the day off’ (S. Polke quoted in P. Gottschaller, Palermo: Inside His Images, Munich 2004, p. 58).
While Palermo’s approach echoed the Pop quality of Richter and Polke’s work, his Stoffbilder also represented a revision of the very fundamentals of painting. Unlike Richter’s painted colour charts, the dyed fabrics refined form, support and colour into an impeccable unity, fulfilling the Modernist ideal of ‘flatness.’ Palermo would back later examples such as the present work with an opaque cotton canvas that prevented any translucency, keeping the colours on the surface. If they shared a consumer-cultural origin with Polke’s fabrics—‘the very stuff that the economic miracle was made of as it entered every German’s living room and closet’, as Christine Mehring notes—their chromatic purity transcended these trappings to approach an Abstract Expressionist sublime (C. Mehring quoted in ibid., p. 61). Finally, by outsourcing not only their colour but also their fabrication—via Ema Richter’s sewing machine—Palermo enacted a Minimalist elision of the artist’s hand.
Inspired early on by Kazimir Malevich, Palermo’s greatest artistic heroes were Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman. He shared these enthusiasms with Imi Knoebel, who accompanied him on a pilgrimage to the Rothko Chapel in Houston in 1974. From his teenage years he was also a passionate follower of jazz music, collecting records that he played in his studio, attending concerts in Berlin and visiting underground clubs and bars in 1970s New York. Polke, who deeply admired Palermo’s work, believed that music was key to understanding his carefully orchestrated combinations of colour. ‘With regard to the sewn-together fabrics,’ Polke said, ‘one has to say that they are chords. Palermo was someone who liked music very much. Music provides the vocabulary with which one gets closer to it … if you follow them, they are like zones of calm, the pictures weren’t legends, weren’t stories. In a room with Palermos, there was silence at first’ (S. Polke quoted in ibid., p. 59). The present work, with its twin fields of black, resounds with a lasting splendour.
Works from the Crex Art Collection
Christie’s is delighted to present an outstanding group of seven works from the prestigious Crex Art Collection. Spread across the 20th/21st Century London Evening Sale and the Post-War & Contemporary Art Day Sale this October, these works capture the pioneering spirit of one of Europe’s finest collections of Minimalist and Conceptual art.
Begun in Zurich in the early 1970s, the Crex Collection was distinguished by its revolutionary focus on the art of its day. In 1978, it showcased its holdings in a major touring exhibition that travelled to institutions including the Louisiana Museum, Humlebaek and the Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven. Already the collection included works by artists including Robert Mangold, Sol LeWitt, Blinky Palermo and Donald Judd, as well as Gerhard Richter, Sigmar Polke and Neo-Expressionist painters such as Georg Baselitz and Markus Lüpertz. Writing in the catalogue, Rudi Fuchs wrote that ‘It was not primarily the desire to own art, it seems, which prompted this collection; there was also the profound wish to support art, contemporary art, in a country with many collections of classic art but with only little activity in the field of really contemporary art’ (R. Fuchs, quoted in Werke aus der Sammlung Crex, Zurich 1978, p. 129).
During the early 1980s, the collection took up residence in the Hallen für neue Kunst in Schaffhausen: a former textile factory. It was one of the first exhibition spaces to make use of an industrial building in this way, and mounted a series of major shows until 2014. Its celebration of both European and American artists, and its dedication to their public display, transformed the landscape for contemporary art in Switzerland and beyond.
All acquired shortly after their creation, the present selection of works demonstrates the sharp connoisseurly vision of the Crex Collection. Highlights include a rare and unique example of Blinky Palermo’s Stoffbilder (Fabric Pictures), distinguished by its vertical rather than horizontal seam. Gerhard Richter’s Grau is one of the landmark group of Grey Paintings that the artist unveiled at the Städtisches Museum, Mönchengladbach in 1974. Brown Wall (1964) is one of the very first works in Robert Mangold’s seminal Walls series, while his Four Color Frame Painting #16 (1985) featured on the cover of The Paris Review in 1989. Completing the selection are works by Markus Lüpertz, Sol LeWitt and Richard Long, rounding out a tightly-curated snapshot of one of the twentieth century’s richest art-historical periods.